 I got involved through friendship with its first director, Lal Jayawardana. I had known him for perhaps five years or so before, most prominently in the Commonwealth Finance Minister's group on the Bretton Woods system, which I chaired. And Lal was a member of that group and we saw quite a lot of one another. And the odd conference here and there. We got along well, so I knew him. And Lal was not a research person. He was not well-connected with the research world. He was a public servant, and he needed people who knew something about research and new people. And he called and asked whether I would help him. And I was very happy to do that. In fact, the first time we met was when he had scarcely arrived in Helsinki. He came to Toronto, only a few blocks from here. He came and paid as well for Carlos Diaz Alejandro to come to Toronto. And the three of us met and tried to help him discuss, think through what he might do with this new institution. Out of that came a particular project, but the background was friendship, contact, and his need to reach out, as he always put it, to people in the academic community and the research community. We originally planned Carlos, Lal, and I to put together a research program to parallel one that the World Bank had just launched. The World Bank had three people in charge of an analysis of the success or lack of their adjustment program. And there were Ian Little, Max Corden, and Carlos Diaz Alejandro. And we thought, well, if we had Carlos as part of a project with wider, that provided a southern perspective, which he was going to try to insert into the World Bank's project, it would probably make the World Bank's project a better one, but more to the point would make it possible to develop an alternative viewpoint. And out of that came the project on stabilization policies. Carlos, unfortunately, died of AIDS a few months later. And Lance Taylor and I picked up pieces and put together a research program on stabilization policies, which I believe to be one of the more successful ventures wider has ever undertaken. There were 18 country studies. 13 of them were done by nationals of the country in which they were studying and researching. In the end, provided a quite unique analysis of what was going on in the stabilization program, which until that point had been primarily understood and driven by the IMF's own analysis, out of it came 18 separate country papers, none of which wider published in the sense of a book. They were put out in paper form. But Lance Taylor did a thin little summary volume called Varieties of Stabilization Experience, which called attention to the enormous diversity of southern experience and the need to deploy specific policies that were relevant to the diverse circumstances of the 18 different countries. I wrote an eight, seven, or eight page critique comments on Lance's original draft, which included a title, which was Tropical Product Temperate Medicine, implying that the IMF was applying medicine that it had used in northern countries that were utterly different and drew on the famous article by Dudley Sears called The Limitations of the Special Case, which argued that developing countries really were sufficiently different, that you needed a different model to work on them. I thought it was unwise to prescribe another single remedy which was implied by that title and rather to emphasize the variety. Within that book was a five or six page list of questions which any negotiator with an IMF mission should ask before beginning. And we were told that that was widely used in developing countries that were undergoing macroeconomic difficulties and were facing negotiation with IMF missions in the face of shortages of data, shortages, in some cases of analysts, the simple list of questions which, if nothing else, required the IMF people to answer them. And I believe that that little, thin little book coming out of a network project in which southern research people were directly involved was a significant input to global discussions of what the IMF should or should not have been doing at that time. I think there were some excellent books that came out of it. I wrote a review of one that perhaps this would now be regarded as a conflict of interest. Wrote a review of the book by Jean Dres and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Policy, I think it was called. I thought it was a brilliant book. And I said in my review that if Wider never did anything else, this book justified its formation, which I believe to be true. I thought it was a wonderful book. That was a high point. I thought our work on stabilization at the time was enormously important and a major positive. I thought our trade policy work was, if anyone had known about it, it was a high point for the participants. A lot of learning and mutual exchange, I think it probably had an impact on the gradual change which has since transpired, making industrial policy more legitimate now than it was then. You weren't allowed to use the praise at that time. I think that was another big positive. Its major positive is its existence as an independent source of development expertise and networking as a base for networking among Southern scholars and public servants. That is a huge positive. The weaknesses in the early days were its ability to get any attention for the things it was doing. And I hope that has been overcome. Wider angle did not exist. Website didn't exist. There wasn't a web. It was a different world in many respects. Whether it has weaknesses that still need remedying, I leap for others. I think it's an enormously important institution. I wish it every success in its next 30 years.